HPCwire: The New Face of the TOP500

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December 21, 2007

The New Face of the TOP500

by Gilad Shainer, MSc, Mellanox Technologies

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In the recent lists, the TOP500 coverage has shifted from pure high-performance computing (HPC) to include more enterprise-based solutions. In the latest TOP500 release, the 30th list, published in November 2007, the majority of the systems were enterprise datacenter (EDC)-based, mainly interconnected rack-mounted systems, while the minority of the systems were the traditional high-performance computers, mainly cluster-based solutions. In this article we will analyze the historical and current technological trends in high-performance computing and provide an updated analysis model for the TOP500 project.

"The only constant is change," said Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher. This is certainly true when describing the market of high-performance computing. The HPC market is characterized by a rapid change of architectures, technologies and usage. The only continuous, steady characteristic of HPC is the ever-growing demand for performance, showing an increase of 100X every ten years based on the TOP500 list.

The enterprise datacenter market is less tolerant to rapid changes, and typically changes are much more moderate. While the HPC market drives the technology further and evaluates many leading-edge architectures, only the proven solutions that have been widely adopted by HPC, and in particular by the commercial HPC markets, are accepted and spread into the EDC market.

The Era of Clustered Commodity Servers

Clustered commodity servers have become the dominant solution both for HPC and EDC, as they offer tremendous price/performance benefits, unparalleled flexibility in deployment, and reduced long-term maintenance. According to the latest TOP500 list, more than 80 percent of the listed systems are clusters. With the fast adoption of the cluster architecture, the importance of interconnect solutions has risen as well.

The use of off-the-shelf commodity and standard components has made its mark on the interconnect solutions, making Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand the dominant solutions. In the early days, when single-core CPUs were the common solution, Gigabit Ethernet was used mainly for the cases where there was no need for intensive I/O, and InfiniBand for high-performance computing or I/O intensive enterprise applications. Since the mid 2000s, multi-core processors have taken over the single-core CPUs due to the ever-increasing need for performance and increasing demand for low power solutions. This new trend pushed the need for fatter standard interconnects that can handle the increasing I/O demands, as more CPUs share the same connection.

Maximizing productivity and reducing power consumption have become the key issues in today's compute solution. In the HPC segment, most applications utilize the entire compute resource, and therefore require high throughput and low-latency connectivity between the cluster server nodes. In the EDC segment, many applications are not compute intensive, and therefore virtualization becomes essential for increasing system productivity. Virtualization enables running multiple environments or multiple applications on the same compute system in order to maximize the CPU utilization. This solution creates the same load on the interconnect, as more throughput is required between servers and between servers and storage. While HPC and virtualized EDC environments are different from the application perspective, they require the same characteristics from the cluster interconnect.

The TOP500 List

The TOP500 project provides a list of sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems. It does not mean that those systems are being used daily as a single supercomputer, and in some cases the daily usage is rather from a single server or a small group of servers. In those cases, the sites or the systems manufacturers gather together the site's compute resources to form a single supercomputer to execute the LINPACK benchmark and submit the results to the TOP500 project. This action is sometimes done during installations of new systems. Since the compute resources in most cases are already connected together, the task of measuring them as a whole is an easy one.

The TOP500 list is considered an HPC-related list, and many analyze the list statistics for understanding market and technology trends. When the system architecture converged for HPC and EDC, the TOP500 list shifted away from providing statistics solely for the HPC market. In particular, this is the case with the latest lists, where clusters have become the dominant solution across the different markets. Clustering enables single servers to scale up and form a supercomputer, even if it is just for one day.

Moreover, clustering and the use of off-the-shelf components brings the power of supercomputing to the HPC masses, and to many other markets. The recent TOP500 lists (in particular the latest one -- the 30th) shifted from representing only the HPC market to representing the entire cluster market, or in general, interconnected servers. In order to provide better and accurate analysis of the TOP500 list, one needs to break the list into two separate lists -- the upper part, the top 100 systems, which continue to truly represent the HPC market, and the lower part, which represents the cluster market -- both HPC and EDC.

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